News this week included: “It won’t happen,” responds Lawrence Wong, prime minister, to a journalist’s question about restricting fuel exports, as Singapore and Australia commit to keep LNG and diesel flowing; the SDP’s Paul Tambyah calls for petrol tax cuts and a temporary windfall levy on oil and gas firms; “Lumpy medical spending and medisave limits”, explainer by the WP’s Jamus Lim, calling for greater flexibility with the scheme; Students for Palestine Singapore hold an anti-imperalist rally at Hong Lim Park; school bullies will face punishments akin to those for vaping, including suspension and caning; barred by their employers from home Wi-Fi, domestic workers find other ways to get online; an ST multimedia piece showing how terrifyingly fast AI chatbots can identify you through your online behaviour; BlueSG, the defunct, point-to-point, car-sharing service, attempts a reboot; the iconic satellite dishes along the BKE are dismantled; a Geylang restaurant faces a backlash after charging a family S$2 for “outside drinks” (two kids were drinking from a mineral water bottle); Japanese Keisuke Honda and Welshman Kai Whitmore join the Singapore Premier League, with the latter open to citizenship; and poor Gan Kim Yong, deputy prime minister, who, having suggested that Singaporeans should take more public transport and switch from aircons to fans amidst the energy crisis, will likely now be mocked whenever he doesn’t.
Finally, regarding the defamation trial of the century—K Shanmugam and Tan See Leng, two ministers, are suing Bloomberg and Low De Wei—we’re covering it in our weekly newsletter, and will write something longer here when it’s concluded.
Below are the issues we explore in depth.
Society: PET peeves
It begins with crude oil. Refined and reformed, its intermediates are used to produce two unassuming substances: purified terephthalic acid (PTA) and monoethylene glycol (MEG). The former is fine white powder; the latter is a clear, odourless, and slightly viscous syrup. Blended into a slurry, the two are put under heat and pressure from reactor to reactor before being cooled into polyethylene terephthalate (PET) resin. This “father of plastics” is found in food packaging, bottles, tubes, and also in the material that forms polyester fibre, fast fashion’s main staple.
With the war on Iran impacting supplies of crude oil, the price of plastic has and will rise. “Our plastic pallet [used in packaging] suppliers have doubled prices and even cancelled contracts because they literally cannot commit to the prices before the war,” Chayadhorn “Ing” Kitiyadisai said in a video explainer on TikTok. Kitiyadisai is the founder of Ingu Skin, a Thai science-driven skincare brand launched in 2022.
Indeed, manufacturers have been hit with rocketing production, utility, and transport costs—forced between cancelling and potentially losing customers, or committing to orders while facing a “sharp profit squeeze”. Some South Asian garment makers are absorbing much of the higher energy and logistics costs as they fulfill orders placed months ago. But once inventory is depleted and new orders placed, consumers can expect a 10 to 15 percent rise in clothing prices. Malaysians meanwhile, are facing a shortage of Farm Fresh milk at supermarkets. The brand clarified that a lack of PET resin has forced it to shift more products into paper cartons and ultra-high temperature (UHT) packaging. This plastic squeeze has also been felt by a local soya sauce maker.
The rise in PET costs has increased demand for recycled plastic. While some early adopters recognise recycled plastic as a hedge against future supply squeezes, the broader market is still adopting strategies that prioritise short-term optimisation over supply security. Still, any industrial waste reduction is welcome; already, the war has had a catastrophic impact on the environment. For consumers too, this is an opportunity to become more conscious of our waste production, as the war serves up daily reminders of the deleterious impact choices made thousands of kilometres away by people unknown can have on us.
Sport: Preserving pickle
“The tigers that are roaming about the Bukit Timah and Sirangoon districts have not yet been killed,” moaned a correspondent to The Straits Times. “Where is the sporting pluck of Singapore gone? Time was when the kubber [news] of a stripes was received with joy...Time is, when…playing at lawn tennis is considered the highest sport.”
“Apparently young Singapore prefers to shine at niminy piminy lawn tennis, rather than to witch the world with noble horsemanship,” wrote another, similarly overcome with nausea at the sight of the new elbowing the old in the stomach. Across the late 19th century colonial world, tennis seemed to pop up from nowhere—a rojak of croquet, rackets (a squash precursor) and courte-paume (best imagined as doing calculus and trigonometry while haring after a ball with a racket). The sudden popularity of something seemingly so trifling caused significant dyspepsia. Some, like the two above, felt sport wasn’t sport unless life and limb were in perennial peril. Tennis was too safe, too effete. On the other hand, there were those who harrumphed at an enterprise so devoid of morals and good taste that it enabled young women to flounce around unladylike in public. Even those not opposed to women playing tennis in principle worried about the game being too taxing for the feminine mind and body. Sadly for them, tennis’ was no transient virality. Today it’s among the most popular sports in the world.
All of which brings us to pickleball. Akin to tennis, it’s a chimera: take a badminton court with a low-slung net, beef up a table tennis racket, inflate a tennis ball made from Swiss cheese-y plastic. Voila. Akin to tennis, it was nowhere one moment; everywhere the next. And akin to tennis, it has elicited much consternation, beginning with the tennis community itself. First came the snobbery—is this rinky-dink thingy really a sport?—followed by territorial howls of disbelief, as pickleball courts slid over tennis ones. In Singapore, they’ve been joined by two other constituencies. Badminton players, who’re seeing their arenas colonised too; and those driven to distraction by the incessant pock-pock of plastic on plastic. Playing times have been restricted, sometimes via polite notices, and other times by the fait accompli of lights killed. Still, détente has proven elusive. A few days ago, an aggrieved Clementi gent summoned his inner Gandhi to become an on-court human barricade.
Pickleball’s proponents speak of community, neighbourhood spirit, and enjoyable, doable movements for creaky knees wary of more kinetic pursuits. (Its safety may be exaggerated. There are injuries aplenty. This correspondent knows someone who got hit in the eye when the ball flew off the racket edge; and another who tried a standing jump over the low net, caught their toe in it and, landing on their humerus on the other side, broke the bone. They failed to see the funny side.) Yet, the benefits pickle confers are not to be scoffed at in an ageing society becoming ever more atomised. It’s more forgiving too, for those who’ve always wanted to try racket sports but felt intimidated by the higher barriers to entry of many traditional ones.
Pickle’s opponents bemoan the disruption of their own communities and sleep cycles. These travails are not trivial in a tiny, cramped, busy nation. Among proposed solutions are more multi-purpose courts away from residential blocks, courts surrounded by noise-blocking walls, as well as noise-absorbing balls and rackets. In time, an equilibrium will be found, and the criticism, lampooning, and impossibility of pickle will seem as quaint as that of tennis seems today.
Earth: All hail, Lord Magawa
The legends are legion. A century ago there was Balto, a Siberian husky who led dog sleds over a thousand kilometres in the frigid Alaskan winter—once stopping on the edge of cracking ice, saving all behind—to deliver 300,000 units of serum to a remote city facing a diphtheria epidemic. In 1998 Lulu, a black, potbellied Vietnamese pig, saw his owner suffering a heart attack in her Pennsylvania home; he squeezed his 68 rotund kilos through a tiny escape hatch, ripping his belly’s skin, ran onto the country road, blocked it by playing dead, and led the first bemused driver back into the house, leading to the owner’s rescue. And in December 2004, sensing danger from a receding ocean in Phuket before any human did, four-year-old elephant Ning Nong rebelled against his mahout and carried an eight-year-old British girl to safety, as the tsunami’s waters reached his shoulders.
Veneration of our war “heroes” is more of a moral quandary, for should any animal be drafted in service of violence? Regardless, we cheer Cher Ami, a homing pigeon who, shot in the breast, blinded in his left eye, and having lost a right leg, was still able to send a message that helped save the US’s “Lost Battalion” in world war one. On the ground below was Stubby, a terrier and the only dog to be promoted to a Sergeant rank through combat, partly because, through his sensitive hearing, he warned others when he heard the whine of artillery shells. In the second world war, an Iranian shepherd gave a Syrian brown bear to Polish forces, who taught him to carry artillery shells and munch on cigarettes. Wojtek’s final days were spent in the Edinburgh Zoo, still responding to Polish—the OG third-culture kid.
The remnants of war—such as toxins, poisons, radioactivity—can harm the planet and its beings for centuries after. Few have the dramatic horror of land mines: one moment a villager in the idyllic Cambodian countryside, the war’s memory fading; the next a bloodied, maimed human, forever marked by ancestral sins. And from gorillas in East Africa to elephants in Sri Lanka and tigers in Cambodia, animals are perhaps their biggest victims. To clear them, we rely on the very vermin we otherwise equate with squalor and filth. Specifically, the giant pouched rat of sub-Saharan Africa, whose head, body and tail can reach a total of 90cm, and weigh up to 1.5kg. They’re deployed on the killing fields, too light to detonate the mines, and with olfactories sensitive enough to sniff them out.
One was Magawa, born in Tanzania and sent to Cambodia when he was two. Known for his speed—sweeping a tennis-court-sized area in just 20mins—his handlers rewarded him with a peanut or banana slice after he scratched on a mine’s surface. In five years he identified over 100 explosives while clearing the equivalent of 20 football fields. He died in 2022 and two weeks ago, a 2.2m statue of him was unveiled in Angkor Wat. Many heroic animals are immortalised—and sometimes, as with Balto the husky, their legacies contested—though this is thought to be the first to a life-saving rodent.
In the 1980s-90s, as Singapore moved from “third” world to “first”, a tiny revenue stream was the land mines produced by Chartered Industries of Singapore. Used as far as the Iran-Iraq conflict, exports were halted in the late 1990s. We’ll never know how much innocent blood was spilled by made-in-Singapore mines. Perhaps karmic penance can be obtained by, on your next visit to the 900-year-old complex, paying obeisance to its youngest deity, Magawa, symbolising all those scurrying, scruffy souls who’re righting our wrongs.
Some further reading: Staff Sergeant Reckless, a Mongolian mare who carried supplies and evacuated the wounded during the Korean War; Tuffy, an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, who in the 1960s enjoyed a peacetime deployment with the US Navy, carrying messages and tools to the ocean’s depths, while practising rescuing divers; Binti Jua, the western lowland gorilla who saved a three-year-old boy who’d fallen into the enclosure at the Brooklyn Zoo in 1996; and Salty and Roselle, guide dogs, who on September 11th 2001, led their respective blind owners safely out of the World Trade Center. The latter, amidst smoke, falling debris and general panic, guided him and 30 others for over an hour down 78 stories, all to safety.
History weekly by Faris Joraimi
“God made the land and the sea; the land He divided among men and the sea He gave in common,” said Ala’uddin, sultan of Gowa in south Sulawesi to the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company in 1615. Now, Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz to regular shipping renews questions about the freedom of the seas. It turns out, physical geography for long-distance trade still matters in an age of borderless and invisible flows of money, data, and energy. Control of strategic waterways and harbours was a feature of the centuries-long trading system of South-east Asia and the wider Indian Ocean world. By the 15th century, shared norms of hospitality and business linked ports from the Swahili coast to the southern Philippines into a relatively stable global economy more or less dominated by Muslim trading states. No wonder then, that the first phase of European colonialism in Asia is usually identified as the Portuguese conquest of major ports that made up this system (and they weren’t coy about their religious motivations). Afonso de Albuquerque’s successful capture of the port-cities of Hormuz (1507), Goa (1510), and Malacca (1511) happened mere years apart. Far from dominating the ocean, the Portuguese probably made it more unsafe and militarised. These gangsters tried to monopolise the entire Indian Ocean via a coercive licensing scheme requiring every vessel to purchase a pass for their safety, or be captured by patrols.
Now that seems awfully similar to what’s happening in the Persian Gulf, with Singapore refusing to negotiate with Iran for passage through the Strait of Hormuz as some countries have done. Vivian Balakrishnan, foreign minister, said that undermines the freedom of navigation enshrined in UNCLOS, an international treaty stipulating that no country should block critical chokepoints. In essence, UNCLOS guarantees waterway transit as a right, not a privilege: a point he emphasised. This is clearly existential for Singapore, the latest in a long line of port-cities that have waxed rich from securing the Straits of Malacca for almost a thousand years. None of those earlier port-cities, however, had the umbrella of a globe-spanning empire, British or American. They paid tribute to China, distant and uninterested in directing local affairs. Was there chaos and anarchy? Quite the opposite. The sea as a commons was still achieved. You just had to be nice to Sultan Ala’uddin, and he had to be nice to you. Of course, personal diplomacy and reciprocal favours stand in the way of efficient exchange and extraction. So you separate the economy from these moral expectations. Enter UNCLOS among other frameworks governing international trade, as a colonial solution to colonial problems.
Arts: The book, the block, and the gutter
The Singapore Art Book Fair (SGABF) began in a tiny nook of the Gillman Barracks arts complex in 2013. There were 30 exhibitors and 1,000 visitors, and it was organised in a month. Last year, there were 120 exhibitors (including Jom) and 5,000 visitors waiting in the sludgy heat in a long coil around columns and cargo lifts at the Tanjong Pagar Distripark. It took the same tiny team a year to put the sprawling fair together, one beloved by artists and the public, and coming off the high of its 10th anniversary. You might enter empty-handed and leave with four years of sunsets in a little wedge of a photo book; a workbook on how to survive your parents’ divorce; and a visual journal on what it means to become a grandmother, by a grandmother. Atelier HOKO, which has been exhibiting with the fair since the start, relished the messy risk-taking, away from the sear of the public eye. The creative studio’s cofounders, Alvin Ho and Clara Koh, spoke excitedly over each other in a short documentary series on the fair: “Everybody just fumbling around, it’s nice right? / Try try / Nobody knows what’s going on.”
Nobody knew what would happen this year, when Atelier HOKO came on board to co-direct the fair, scheduled for August at T:>Works. The core team was tired, but in lieu of a hiatus, they thought they’d scale down. They released an open call on April 6th for “walking exhibitors”, emerging book artists who’d pay S$150 to walk the fair grounds with portable display cases, peddling their wares capped at S$25 per item. The brief leaned into artspeak, to “soften spatial hierarchies”, to make the fair “less of a marketplace and more a field of encounter”.
The outrage was immediate, and incessant. Singaporean artists, overworked and undervalued, were shocked that SGABF—which just two years ago had offered subsidised Artist Support Tables for half the price of regular booths—would even consider a model that strayed from its egalitarian roots and sharpened what they perceived as “class differences” between first-time exhibitors and established ones. It was humiliating, commenters suggested, to wander the fair like a “geylang contraband peddler”, “a walking hotdog stand”, or “pedagang asongan”, the itinerant vendors of Indonesia. Much of the criticism was valid; many of the comments were cruel. For three days, artists, feeling betrayed, pilloried the fair they’d previously praised. The fair walked back their walking exhibitor model. It explained that it had imagined these mobile exhibitors with the flexibility to rest whenever they needed to, hanging out with fellow exhibitors if they felt like it. The fair’s missteps, so necessarily invisible in its earlier years, were now on display for all to see, and judge.
What happens next? It’s hard to say. “Conversational repair is fundamental to conversation,” Kevin Durrheim, social psychologist, said in a recent lecture on polarisation. “When you say something and it is wrong or you offend someone else, someone says to you, ‘How can you say that’, and you will say, ‘Sorry, you misunderstood me. I didn’t mean that, I meant this.’ That’s repair.” Repair is built into the architecture of our in-person conversations, so that we social creatures can remain in community with others. But on the internet, so researchers discovered, nearly half of these ruptures now go unrepaired. Durrheim calls these “incivility norms”. As artists, we’re often champions of civil discourse—but are we becoming uncivil? Do we run the risk of social fragmentation, and the rise of tiny islands with their own narrow and militant vocabularies to differentiate themselves from the next?
Some further reading: In “For the love of art books: creative practice and independent publishing in South-east Asia”, curator Seet Yun Teng explores the rise of the art book in Singapore and the region.
Faris Joraimi, Abhishek Mehrotra, Sakinah Safiee, Corrie Tan, and Sudhir Vadaketh wrote this week’s issue.
Letters in response to any blurb can be sent to sudhir@jom.media. All will be considered for publication on our “Letters to the editor” page.
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Correction notice: A previous version referred to the Singapore Premier League by its old name, S.League.
